Controlling Thoughts by Controlling Language in Albuquerque

Controlling people physically is easy. All you need is guns, clubs, and cages. Controlling their minds requires a little more sophistication. As George Orwell understood, it can be accomplished to a large extent by limiting their vocabularies, thereby limiting their thoughts. That’s why the Albuquerque edition of the Newspeak dictionary is striking terms like “illegal immigrant” and “transvestite”:

Albuquerque city councilors [recently] called on local media organizations to use “responsible speech” and avoid “derogatory language and inaccurate representation of marginalized [i.e., politically favored] groups.”

The bill, sponsored by Rey GarduÃ±o, won approval on a 5-3 party-line vote — Democrats in the majority — after about a dozen people testified in favor of it.

The measure doesn’t identify any particular words or phrases as “irresponsible,” but several supporters of the measure objected to use of the phrase “illegal immigrant” in news reports to describe a person living in a country without legal permission.

Some also raised concerns about how transgender people are described.

Even some of the lefties infesting the ACLU are waking up to the fact that politically correct limitations on our language are an insidious threat to our liberty:

Peter Simonson of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico spoke against GarduÃ±o’s bill.

Despite good intentions, he said, “we don’t believe it’s the place of government officials to urge the press and the community at large to censor their speech. … The most effective way to confront offensive or disrespectful speech is to counter with more, positive speech. That’s not a government role. That’s the role of the private citizen.”

But from the point of view of true statists, the government is the voice of the people; therefore, the private citizen has already been spoken for whenever a decree has been issued.

The bill represents the cutting edge in liberal legislation. By leaving it vague as to exactly what speech is “responsible” versus “derogatory,” the measure foreshadows future laws, which will be written so as to allow retroactive bans on various words and phrases. That is the only way sluggish legislatures will be able to keep pace with the constriction of our language.

Like many tyrannical laws these days, the legislation was pushed by activists outside the government. In this case they include the following: